"How we think and feel about time largely determines our view of the world. Native American cultures have always believed that we had to be in synchrony with nature. It is a different way of seeing the world -- one group rushing away from nature, the other group rushing to a place, one group seeing linear time, the other group seeing circular time.

John Mohawk explained in a BBC talk (Mohawk, 2000):

The Iroquois, for example, thought that what we do today will reverberate for a long time in the future so there was a true conservatism, not conservative in the right/left politics but conservative in the sense you would be very careful about what it is that you did now because you would understand that it would have magnified effects down the road. There was that idea that people had to act today in responsibility for things that would happen seven generations into the future.

We now live in a world in which we complain if the doors on the lift take too long to close. We are poised to alter our sense of time. We need to look deep within ourselves and decide whether we are sure we are going to become time-wise and not time-foolish."